As we've been reporting, Heber, although he's been the president of the church since 1982, had so fallen from favor in the eyes of Scientology leader David Miscavige, he had been seen in public only rarely since around 2004 -- and multiple former church executives say that from at least 2006 to 2010, he was being held in Scientology's hellish office-prison at its International Base, known as "The Hole."

David said that not only has he been told by Scientology workers at the base that he could not talk to his brother, but that if he attempted to come see Heber, he would be turned away.

I just talked to David again, who says our story produced a very surprising result: this morning, Heber called him and angrily berated him for talking to the press.

"I'm glad that it happened," David tells us, "because it got him out of his cage to talk to me."

I asked David, who lives in Utah, how this morning's phone call went, and this is how he described it:

"He called me and said some of these things in your article aren't true. I said you damn well know that they're true."

David says they argued over the scene we portrayed in Friday's story, about the visit that David made to Scientology's Int Base and the meal they had. When Heber asked him what he thought of the base, David told him that it was "straight from hell."

David says he told Heber this morning that those were his exact words.

"He said, 'Well, this is my religion.' I told him, that this is how I feel," David said to me.

"He said that I should call him. I said: Shoot, Heber, I do try to call you."

David told Heber that he believed others were listening in on the conversation.

"He said he didn't want me talking to any more reporters. I told him, Well, what I said was true, and you know darn well it's what is going on there."

David said that Heber actually sounded quite good. "He sounds like he's in better shape now than when I talked to him a few years ago. But he's only calling me because they want him to get me to stop saying those things."

David says Heber insisted that he was not a prisoner on the base.

"He said he could go where he wants, which is a lie. I asked him what he's doing. He said he's a 'corporate officer.' I don't believe it," David said.

When I talked to David for our earlier story, he was unaware that Heber had made a rare appearance in Los Angeles, for the memorial of Heber's son, Alexander, 27, who died under mysterious circumstances. As we've been reporting, Heber's ex-wife and Alexander's mother, Karen de la Carriere, was denied access to her son's body before he was cremated and then was not invited to the church's memorial because she was excommunicated by Scientology in 2010 for speaking out about the way Heber was being treated.

"You won't allow the mother of the child to be there," David chided his brother. "He said, No, I didn't want her around. She's given too much hell to Scientology already."

David said his opinion of the church hasn't changed after today's phone call.

"Scientology's not honest. It's a terrible organization. As far as I'm concerned it's straight from hell. And I know a lot of things he doesn't know. I think they had someone there to make sure he didn't say the wrong things."

At one point, David says, he told Heber, "I thought Ortega was your friend." He says Heber's response was "We're not friends anymore."

(Actually, I've never spoken to Heber Jentzsch.)

David says Heber's reason for the call was to convince him not to say anything else to the media.

"Don't talk to anyone else ever again, he said. I told him, you got too many henchmen taking care of you there. He said, You can come see me. No, I can't, I told him. They told me don't come, I can't get in," David told me.

"I told him I don't think you're telling me the truth. But at least I got him out of his little hole to talk to me."

He didn't like that, David told me.

"This is not funny, he said. Heber, I said, you know as well as I do that I worry about you. I've called several times, and you just will not let me talk to you. I told him you sound more like a young man again. All the other times you sounded like you were practically dead."

I told David that Heber did look surprisingly healthy in a photograph taken at the memorial. Our last reliable information from the base had Jentzsch in The Hole in 2010. Since then, has he been receiving better treatment?

"The management there is really upset about it," David said, referring to our article on Friday.

"He told me, You can call, I'll make sure you get to talk to me. OK, I'll try again," David says he told Heber.

I told David I was thrilled that our article prompted his brother to talk to him for the first time in years, even if Heber sounded angry.

**********Tony Ortega has been the editor in chief of the Village Voice since March, 2007. He started writing about Scientology in 1995. You can reach him by e-mail at tortega@villagevoice.com, and if you ask nicely he'll put you on his mailing list for notifications of new stories. You can also catch his alerts at Twitter (@VoiceTonyO), at his Facebook author page, on Pinterest, a Tumblr, and even this new Google Plus doohickey.

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I was being ironic when I used the term "due process" because it is a process which Heber, in his years with the Church, was only too happy to consider justice when applied to others. It was a process that he considered so inoffensive that he told the brother urging him to abandon the "evil" organization "I can't leave. I'm making too much money. I'll be a millionaire soon."David Miscavige would have been impotent if not for all the others proping him up and who now blame Miscavige not only for his sins-but for THEIR sins. Cradling the evil doers who abandoned their children and persecuted others.......nope. Guess I haven''t reached that plane of "spiritual developpment" yet.

mr ortega,i am hooked,i cannot get enough of your stories,fascinating ! thanks for enlightening us about this dangerous cult,im not talking about a persons chosen beliefs but the set up that miscavige is leading,scary stuff!

Douchebag Monster is already known to be a liar with Small Man Syndrome. It's no surprise that he pulled Heber out of his Hole (maybe that sounds wrong...um...nah) so he could say he's fighting the VV and Ortega. Sad, but true. DM treats people like sock puppets, he moves their mouths and does a horrible ventriloquist number while his fearful underlings applaud anyway. Very sad, but I'm glad David got to talk to Heber.

DM could save himself and his organization a lot of embarrassment and trouble by simply following the strict rules of the Sea Org concerning family and relatives, which state that a Sea Org must remain in regular contact with outside family and friends and visit family and relatives at least once or twice a year. This applies to even people on the RPF (at least at PAC). And all of this is to ensure that no one creates trouble for the org.

By keeping anyone locked up and hidden in a desert base in the middle of nowhere with no access to the outside world to the extent that rumors fly around that someone might be dead, is just very pathetic and begging for trouble.

I just don't get it. Literally everything DM does gets Scientology into trouble. Every decision he makes is the wrong one. He can't get anything right, and whatever he does with the intent to help or protect Scientology has the reverse effect. The man is a walking, talking PR disaster.

And yet there has never even been one attempt at mutiny within the organization against him? In normal society, a corporate dictator who goes around beating the living daylights out of his subordinates and imprisoning them would have been shot dead long ago.

I don't know if anyone has asked this question, but did anyone besides the writer of the email sent to Scientologists actually admit to being at the Memorial Service? Is there any other evidence that the Memorial Service really took place?

I know, I sound like a nutty conspiracy theorist. But if the photo is possibly from another event years earlier, and the only info about the service is what is contained in the email, did the tree fall in the forest?

Since no one has asked this question I'm assuming there was hard evidence, i.e. witnesses to the service happening.

Hi Midget....waves! Did you read Rinder's screed on Rathbun's blog yesterday Davey? It was rockin'. I bet you hated those two almost as much as you hate Heber. What did you do with Tommy Davis lately? You have lost so many minions we can't keep up. The new (and not very impressive) batch you have tried to unleash as your uh...spokespersons...well...Weak, Davey, just weak.

Oh, and you let Heber make a phone call. You must be getting battle weary to direct that action!

Now that your armor is crumbling I bet you are back suckin' on that inhaler and cuddling your blankie.

Deep down you are just a cowardly little pussy. You are going to look great in jailhouse stripes!

Maybe you can get Armani to make you custom jumpsuits. It's not like he would need more than a yard of material.

Enjoy the next few weeks there bucko!

__________________________________

And MariannaP is right about the com system. I was away for the weekend with my trusty IPad, but it was only helpful as a reader. I am sure they will get it all worked out...but for now it is terribly frustrating.

Have the police had any contact with Heber? You would think that they would, as generally, they'd talk to close family members to get background info. I wonder if he would make himself available for a person to person chat with them.

Heber sounds like an a*hole. He denies Scientology has anything to do with not seeing his brother and then, in the same breath, he makes justification for his son's mother not being permitted to attend his memorial because she caused hell for the church. Way to talk out of both sides of your mouth, Heber. Which is it now?

It's because Miscarriage is a true SP. It's what they do. It's their nature.

People who have blown and are declared SP are not SPs. That is just character assassination, not in any way diagnostic of their case. People who have not studied Scientology are confused by this distinction. I hope this clears it up.

@PoisonIvy The completely non-transparent, utterly opaque, completely given to lying, disengenuous, lying-with-their-pants-on-fire world of $cientology only invites conspiracy theories. It's like the old Soviet Union. What does that cryptic statement from the Kremlin actually mean? Let us parse that phrase....

@zolotoy6 That's nothing compared to Kendrick Moxon after the Scientology crooks murdered his daughter. Moxon didn't seem to care one bit, he just took a jet to Florida and pretended his daughter's murder didn't matter one bit. It's why the shitting insane criminal was given the title "Father of The Year."

I was a member on disqus before coming to this site and I'm sure many others were as well. Some make take issue with the fact that this comment system initially sets your screen name as whatever your e-mail name is before the "@" which might worry some who don't want a flood of e-mails from COS members.

If anyone was wondering you can go back in your profile and change your nick name to whatever you want.

Well Fred, the TR's (Training Routines) teach Scientologists to be able to repress their emotions and generate false ones. But Kendrick Moxon's sudden apoplectic rage during a three-way conversation with Keith Henson and one of Graham Berry's attorneys in 2001 when Keith said he was going to Gold Base to protest Stacy's death, suggest to me that he was grief stricken and unable to hide his real feelings.

It is believed that he didn't want his daughter to join the Sea Org anyway, knowing full well the régime, but she was the one who insisted.

I think also there are fewer "likes" getting handed out by the people that registered to post here. I personally don't like seeing my avatar on someone else's post when I click "like." I think SkipPress had around 80 likes on one of his comments before we switched.

@MariannaP. Yeah, I miss getting replies in my profile, too. Plus, You go from one page and back, and then comments are missing, then they reappear, it's too strange and pointless. But I imagine that they are committed to it, so complaining is probably pointless as well.

@MariannaP. No, it was developed by an equally destructive force: a bunch of 26-year-old computer geeks in San Francisco who lack adequate adult supervision and who think their digital hipness excuses lack of attention to the boring details such as performance tuning and actually testing the browser compatibility that they are supposed to deliver.

26-year-olds are not generally as evil as the OSA but do seem able to cause as much "enturbulation" to the user base.

It can even be their first step into participation before they figure out whether they like the place and people or not. It's a lot of mess to register, fill everything, choose the avatar and so on, it needs motivation. Before people could just like if they didn't want to write, they could post as guests if they didn't want to be engaged with the whole site and everything, they could register afterwards if they felt like they stay for a long time. The new system is like : "No dates, you see me, if you want me, you marry me"...

@EinsteinontheBeach@MariannaP.@victoriapandora Sometimes I just want to read and not have to log in to "like" a comment. I appreciated that Disqus gave you that option. I would imagine that unregistered people "liked" comments as well. Some people simply want to lurk and not post, yet agree with some of the posts...so that may be the loss of additional "likes".

@MariannaP. Well wha was cool about Disqus was that you could comment on different sites, and still get messages/replies in one place. You can't do that with livefrye.You can't even get replies from livefrye, you have to scan the entire page to see if someone answered your question etc. It's not convenient, and not geared toward a really good user experience.

@MariannaP. Yes, that can make you dizzy if a lot of people are commenting. I think it's partially that the new system isn't all that user -friendly, but also that it isn't hot as hell out and people are taking advantage of that. I know I did.

Yeah...but I'm somewhat worried. Just remember how many comments there was usually for one single article and how many there is now. I don't have an impression that the comments became more thorough or informatif or whatever, there is even more of chit-chatter (well, what can you do more with this crazy system of "alert!alert!new comment I don't know where I don't know why")...